What is an evangelical, and am I one?

In this Tidings piece we're going to sketch one of the foundational "evangelical" convictions shared by most, but not all self-identified evangelicals: namely, to be Bible-believing you must accept the literal, word-for-word truth of the whole Bible.

As we saw earlier in this series, scripture alone--sola scriptura in Latin--became the touchstone for Luther and most subsequent Protestants then and now including most contemporary American evangelicals. The rub was that folks soon found that they couldn't agree on what "scripture alone" taught about Christian belief and practice. And so the principle of "scripture alone" actually facilitated the repeated splintering of Protestant groups, as each group adopted conflicting "takes" on what Scripture teaches.

By the time Protestant Christianity reaches America, its many varying and disagreeing defenders had developed their own way to claim and even, they thought, "prove" that their understanding of Scripture alone was the true and correct one, and the alternatives offered by other Protestants or, for that matter, Catholics, were false. Much of this debate and defense rested on what came to be called "prooftexting," that is, taking verses of Scripture, assumed to be true, and employing them in a logical argument (deploying "reason") to "prove" the rightness of the position they were defending or the falseness of the position they were attacking. With this they moved step-by-step towards a foundational assumption that all of Scripture had to be divinely inspired, without errors, and infallible. The Bible, rightly understood, gave a true picture of the world, humanity, salvation, and morality.

With the rise of science in the 18th and 19th centuries, it became common to argue that since God was the creator of the world, including all of nature and human beings, and since God was also the author of scripture, therefore nature and scripture must agree with and reinforce each other. It was further assumed that morality could also be derived both from the "Book of Scripture" and from the "Book of Nature."

This worked for a time. But the approach found itself under increasing strain with the rise of two modern developments.

An approach to Bible that treated it like any other ancient piece of literature and placed its accounts within their quite varied historical contexts and concerns, and
The development of modern, evidentiary science (especially Darwinism), which favored "natural causes" including variation and natural selection (evolution) over claims of divine design.

Christians began to divide over how to handle these tensions. The so-called "modernists" or "theological liberals" found ways to accommodate Christian claims with the findings of history and natural science, often by confining claims of Scriptural truth to matters of divine-human relationship, salvation, and morality. Most mainline Protestant denominations (and ultimately Roman Catholics) took variations on this course. Others, however, some of whom came to be called Fundamentalists, doubled down on the truth claims for all of Scripture, including insisting on the literal truth of creation stories of Genesis, the literal historical accounts of the Old and New Testaments, and the divine origin of morality based on divine commandments and scriptural examples.

With variations and some subsequent developments we find much the same insistence on the literal word-for-word truth of Bible in our contemporary Evangelicals. This (much contested) conviction, they believe, gives them a solid foundation on which to oppose the "modernizing" tendencies of historical scholarship, natural science, and, most importantly, morality rooted in something other than Biblical commandments or exhibited in Old and New Testaments (as variously understood by evangelicals).

Scripture and the Word of God Distinguished

The brief account verges necessarily on caricature, I admit. But it still captures, I hope, the main history of the literal word-for-word approach to Scripture deployed by many evangelicals.

Now it is time to briefly contrast this view with the one found in Martin Luther and some, but by no means all, subsequent Lutherans and other Protestants.

Living in the 16th century, Luther did not have to wrestle as did American evangelicals with the findings of 19th and 20th century biblical and scientific scholarship that challenged the authority of the Bible as traditionally understood. Luther did not question the divine authorship of Scripture broadly understood but also did not insist that every word in Scripture had been dictated by God and should be taken as literally, word by word, true. That was not the important question for Luther.

The authority of Scripture, for Luther, came from the Gospel message it contained and conveyed.

First, Luther generally distinguished between Scripture, on the one hand, and the Word of God, on the other. “God and the Scripture of God are two things,” he said at one point, “no less than the Creator and the creature are two things.” At another point Luther distinguished between the cloths that swaddled the infant Jesus and Jesus himself. The cloths in which the infant Jesus was wrapped “are nothing but Holy Scripture, in which Christian faith lies wrapped up.”

Second, Luther understood the "Word of God" to be the message, the "good news," that God through Christ has forgiven our sins, apart from works. God's forgiveness is an act of unmerited grace. The Word of God can be found in Scripture wherever this unmerited grace through Christ is clearly taught--in both the Old and New Testaments!

The distinction between the gospel content of Scripture and Scripture itself finds perhaps its clearest expression in Luther’s 1522 prefaces to the New Testament. Here Luther identified his central concern, namely, that the readers of the New Testament be instructed so that they could rightly distinguish “laws and commandments” from the “Gospel and promises of God.” For the Gospel, Luther insisted, “does not in fact demand our works so that we become pious and holy through them.” Rather it condemned such works. It demanded only faith in Christ, faith “that he has overcome sin, death, and hell for us and thus made us righteous, alive, and saved, not through our own works but through his own work, death, and suffering so that we may take on his death and victory as if we had done it ourselves.”

Drawing on the distinction between law and Gospel, Luther offered a fascinating one-page excursus entitled “which are the true and most noble books of the New Testament.” In effect Luther was telling his readers that not all Scripture was of equal value, since not all taught equally well the proper distinction between law and Gospel. The Gospel of John, Paul’s epistles (especially the one to the Romans), and Peter’s first epistle were “the true kernel and marrow among all the books,” he said. In contrast, he questioned, for example, whether James even belonged in the New Testament because it “contradicted Paul and all the rest of Scripture in attributing justification to works,” and that it failed to mention the suffering, resurrection, and spirit of Christ. He asserted that, “[t]he true touchstone for judging all books is to see whether they promote Christ or not.” But all James did was to promote the law and its works.

Some questions

What do you think of Luther's distinction between Word of God and Scripture? Do you agree with him?
What do you think of Luther's way of determining what is authoritative in the Bible, namely, "that which promotes the ‘good news’ and the promises of God in Christ"?

Remember: Luther lived before many significant developments that changed the way we view and understand Scripture and grant it authority. We can never completely recapture the naiveté that informed Luther’s understanding of Scripture even if we explicitly adopt his position. In some cases, we probably would not want to.

Can you think of some cases where we are likely to disagree with our eponymous founder about the right understanding of the "good news," the Gospel?